Sea State & Ship Motion

[Subtype Zero]

IABL--

I have also been working on the pitch and roll of various ships, but mainly to prevent the tendency of some ships (tramp steamers, Granville type freighters, LST's, etc.) from sinking in heavy seas. See my brief thread on this topic here: http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=138180 I think I have made some significant progress in this area and I hope to update my STzTrampSteamerFix mod sometime later today.

Privateer is correct, of course, about the function of values such as gc_height and fr_ratio. Lower gc_height to get a more stable ship (less roll). I think you can also get more stable behavior by altering the mass and surfaced_displacement values as you indicated you have already tried. Usually, lowering mass results in the ship sitting higher in the water--try the opposite in order to get it to sit lower (you may also have to increase surfaced_displacement to help achieve the effect of a heavier ship). I have also had some success altering pitch with fr_ratio, which seems to be set to a default of .5 for all ships.

I have not tried altering LR or UD drag yet, as I did not know what those values did! Thanks, Privateer, for shedding light on that! I will investigate what effect those values have on the changes I have already made on my ships later today.

[Subtype Zero]

IABL--
How much up or down did you alter the UD drag values? I'm trying to guess a good starting point for changing those values.

[iambecomelife]

Originally Posted by Subtype Zero

IABL--
How much up or down did you alter the UD drag values? I'm trying to guess a good starting point for changing those values.

I changed them to 300 and 500 but this caused some problems with handling. Setting them to .003 (UD) and .005 (LR) and setting weight based on displacement seems to give a good result. The ships sort of plough through the sea instead of bobbing around - however, they still move too much for my tastes. I think the larger merchants should remain almost motionless until there is a very heavy swell.

[Philipp_Thomsen]

The best results I've found was increasing the size of all vessels in the game by 10x.

A ship that has 200m, now has 2000m. But all the ships and subs are 10x bigger, so there's no discrepancy, they all look normal. The good part is the waves, the scenary looks 1000x more realistic. The ships ignores the waves, steady as a rock, like it is in real life. Also, they look bigger, coz if you think about it, the waves are 10x smaller. Now they look like real ships in the water, like in real life. It all looks perfect. We can't reduce the wave size by 10x, coz it would take a computer from NASA to process all that zillion waves (smaller waves, more waves to fill the same space). So enlarging the ships was the only alternative.

Downsides? Some... the ports have to be increased too. As the ship have the same speed, it takes the same time to travell from one place to the other, so no problem there. But in the campaign, it doesn't work, coz in the convoys the ships are too close to eachother, and ships 10x bigger are spawned into one another. The whole campaign would have to be fixed, too much work. But as an experiment, in a mission I've created, it looks fenomenal, just like a movie.

Speaking of movie... I've been watching some movies and paying a lot of attention into the waves. There are a ZILLION little waves in the visual range... really, a ZILLION! There's no way a computer could process that much data, not conciveble to a video card to render that much waves. So what did ubisoft done? Increased the size of the waves, so a computer could process all that sh!t. The results? Ships looks ridiculously small, like plastic ships on a pool. For me, this kills the realism. When you are looking to a ship in the periscope, it seems to have not more than 30 meters. The uboat? Looks like a freaking toy, a 1:18 scale, in plastic.

Someday we will have decent computers to render a realistic world. Until then, this is what we have.

Now you might think... "What if we increase the size of the ships, and the uboats, and the ports, and the trees, and the birds, and everything?"

Well... imagine the workaround to set the entire campaign data, resizing the space between ships in the convoys, all of them. Besides, we would have to study the behavior or the damage. Is it different? I think that the size of the planet can be sustained as it is. I know it would be not equivalent to the ship's sizes, but if we increase it as well, we are back at step one, facing problems with oversized waves.

This is something to think about it. I think that it could turn out to be a incredible idea, and one incredible mod for realism purposes, based on what I've seen for myself here, at my old rig.

Words...?

[iambecomelife]

Originally Posted by Philipp_Thomsen

The best results I've found was increasing the size of all vessels in the game by 10x.

A ship that has 200m, now has 2000m. But all the ships and subs are 10x bigger, so there's no discrepancy, they all look normal. The good part is the waves, the scenary looks 1000x more realistic. The ships ignores the waves, steady as a rock, like it is in real life. Also, they look bigger, coz if you think about it, the waves are 10x smaller. Now they look like real ships in the water, like in real life. It all looks perfect. We can't reduce the wave size by 10x, coz it would take a computer from NASA to process all that zillion waves (smaller waves, more waves to fill the same space). So enlarging the ships was the only alternative.

Downsides? Some... the ports have to be increased too. As the ship have the same speed, it takes the same time to travell from one place to the other, so no problem there. But in the campaign, it doesn't work, coz in the convoys the ships are too close to eachother, and ships 10x bigger are spawned into one another. The whole campaign would have to be fixed, too much work. But as an experiment, in a mission I've created, it looks fenomenal, just like a movie.

Speaking of movie... I've been watching some movies and paying a lot of attention into the waves. There are a ZILLION little waves in the visual range... really, a ZILLION! There's no way a computer could process that much data, not conciveble to a video card to render that much waves. So what did ubisoft done? Increased the size of the waves, so a computer could process all that sh!t. The results? Ships looks ridiculously small, like plastic ships on a pool. For me, this kills the realism. When you are looking to a ship in the periscope, it seems to have not more than 30 meters. The uboat? Looks like a freaking toy, a 1:18 scale, in plastic.

Someday we will have decent computers to render a realistic world. Until then, this is what we have.

Now you might think... "What if we increase the size of the ships, and the uboats, and the ports, and the trees, and the birds, and everything?"

Well... imagine the workaround to set the entire campaign data, resizing the space between ships in the convoys, all of them. Besides, we would have to study the behavior or the damage. Is it different? I think that the size of the planet can be sustained as it is. I know it would be not equivalent to the ship's sizes, but if we increase it as well, we are back at step one, facing problems with oversized waves.

This is something to think about it. I think that it could turn out to be a incredible idea, and one incredible mod for realism purposes, based on what I've seen for myself here, at my old rig.

Words...?

That is a very interesting idea, although it would be a massive undertaking as you said.

One interesting thing I just discovered was that decreasing the drag values seems to have some very impressive side effects on ship handling. Now, after a ship is torpedoed it will careen out of control for a time, sometimes facing at a 90' angle from where it was traveling. It's very dramatic without being unrealistic (this did in fact happen sometimes when a ship lost way). I also noticed that a stationary merchantman will now drift a substantial distance, making it difficult to keep track of ships that you have damaged. IMO this is a very effective way of simulating the effects of ocean currents - many a damaged ship probably escaped because the attacking submarine eventually lost contact and didn't plot its drift correctly.

I would like to incorporate these changes into all of my ships, but first I need to check if there are any negative side effects on the gameplay as a whole.

[Philipp_Thomsen]

A lot of side-effects...

[iambecomelife]

Originally Posted by Philipp_Thomsen

A lot of side-effects...

Headache, chest pains, nosebleeds, and dry mouth.

Anyway, one ... side effect I am worried about is the tendency for docked ships to drift. They already move around too much as it is, and sometimes they will ram into the piers until their HP reaches 0 and they explode. Maybe this happens because campaign modders set the speed to 0 without actually checking the "docked ship" box in the mission editor. Then again, it could be an inherent problem that appears regardless of whether the docking option is used. In that case, reducing drag would make things a lot worse.